From the first moment she opens up the case of General Gabler's famous pistols, Kate Fry's Hedda seems well aware of her name and how her story ends.

Director Kimberly Senior's slyly self-aware, shrewdly revisionist and thrillingly intimate new Writers Theatre production of the classic Henrik Ibsen portrait of the neurotic, 19th-century married woman — OK, maybe Hedda was always just really, really bored with all the schlumpy Scandinavian men with whom she must share the frigid airspace — is a "Hedda Gabler" that knows it's a "Hedda Gabler," and knows you know too.

Both Senior and her leading actress are fully willing to play with the audience's knowledge of this famously excessive play and our perennial fascination with a woman usually played as a seductive diva in a red dress, a crazy wildcat in heat who variously ensnares a trio of dull, self-absorbed men with all her submerged sexual energy.

Well, all of Hedda's needy acolytes — Sean Fortunato's George Tesman, Mark L. Montgomery's Eilert Lovborg and Scott Parkinson's Judge Brack — can be seen with their tongues hanging out at one point, even if they know how to talk. But in this production, especially in Fry's externally understated but internally pulsing performance, you get the sense that Hedda hates sex. With these guys, anyway. When she does exploit that kind of physical language, it's merely to get something quickly, and she finishes as fast as possible.

There's nothing here of Maggie the Cat. This Hedda's main problem is not so much her own bipolar tendencies but other people.

She's more cipher than siren, reactive rather than proactive. She's a canvas who is too smart to be anybody else's blank anything, or to cook her academic husband's dinner. And it's that tragic problem — the problem of many 19th- and 20th-century women whose names have not lived on — that drives Hedda to her fate, which here feels like a date she has arranged for herself from the beginning. She even seems to come to hate the confines of her own play, written as it was by a man.

Did Ibsen understand his Hedda, or was he too busy desiring her for himself and appealing to his audience surrogates across the years? It's a question Senior explicitly puts into play here.

To some degree, Senior's production is a bit of directorial feminist revisionism of a famously problematic and reductive play. Arguably, Ibsen knew about as little about women as did Sigmund Freud, although at least Ibsen was writing about these issues in 1890. But as with the best such works, Senior's deft blending of "Hedda the play" and "Hedda the perception" doesn't so much feel like an imposition on the original text (the translation used here is the excellent one by Nicholas Rudall) as a teasing out of latent themes, a subtle shifting of priorities that helps you see what always was there.

There are a number of intensely revealing performances, including a beautifully panicked piece of acting by Chaon Cross, who plays Thea Elvsted, the other youngish woman in the play who deals with her own sexual confusion in precisely the opposite way as Hedda. Hedda shoots. Thea goes into research.

The scenes between Fry and the subtly avuncular Parkinson, who gets to play one of literature's more wily seducers and who dances around this little Glencoe theater here in all kinds of exciting ways, are juicy indeed. They suggest a girl has to take her intellectual ripostery where she can get it.

Montgomery steps a little further into excess than the rest of the cast — I think a notch under would serve the show better — but his scenes are also hugely compelling. And Fortunato is a fine clueless husband, a rather pathetic picture of a man who thinks the beauty of his wife has made him the envy of all and who cannot see his own total lack of control.

But it's Hedda's name on the marquee, and it's Fry who'll command your attention with a performance of, truly, international quality, despite its seeming backyard setting, which I mean in all the complexity of that term. On one viewing you'll likely feel like you haven't fully tracked this incredibly smart and vulnerable actress's route through the play, but you know she has a track as clear at the Union Pacific rails that run right outside this theater. Still, Fry and Senior make it clear that she has decided her life is just a role, a character she might play as one way to postpone the blowing out of her brains. For three acts, you watch her try that out. It does not go so well. As well she knows.

Designer Jack Magaw's jagged setting, all fem flowers and odd, emaciated angles, slices through the Writers' space. One of Magaw's main entryways is elevated, which has the effect of making it look like huge people on stilts are arriving at Hedda's place, before they suddenly descend into the marital muck with the rest of us.

Even the two smaller roles, Kathleen Ruhl's maid Berte and Barbara Figgins' Aunt Tesman, seem to add to Senior's gripping probing of the woman's lot, offering a melancholy picture of potential futures for Hedda. Neither benevolence nor servitude appeal, of course. So Hedda has to do what Hedda has to do.